DevOps, or the collaboration between development and operations teams, is an important component of IT companies today. Developing and implementing a DevOps culture helps to focus IT results. With decentralized and cloud based infrastructure, working in production today often means continuous deployments and an environment distributed all over the world. There is clear evidence to suggest that a DevOps approach to tech development can have significant impact on the velocity of an IT organization and to save time and money as the gap between developers and IT operations teams closes. Early last year, Gartner predicted that in 2016. a quarter of global 2,000 companies will adopt DevOps and that it is set to evolve from “a niche to a mainstream strategy”. The global DevOps tools market alone is expected to be worth $ 3 biilion by 2019, according to Technavio.

There is an incredible array of services, tools and technologies available to organizations as they strive to meet their goals for faster delivery of higher quality software. But with hundreds of IT management and DevOps tools on the marketplace today, both open source and commercial, it’s hard to know where to start.

To help your DevOps process, we have searched for the best tools for DevOps engineers. To make the cut, these tools must include relevant and useful features, support several languages and operating systems, and be known for their reliability and security.

Here is a list of well-known tools that play an important role in DevOps strategies:

Ansible is an open source tool used to deploy applications to remote nodes and provision servers in a repeatable way. It does this by providing a common framework for publishing multi-trier applications and applications by using a push model setup. We listed some of the pros and cons for using Ansible below:

Next on our list is another open source tool – Chef. It is focused on developer side for its user base and is a tool for configuration management. Chef operates as a master-client model with a separate workstation needed to control the master. Being based on Ruby means that knowledge of Ruby and pure Ruby for writing elements is a must. Here are some pros and cons:Puppet has been around long enough that it was tried and deployed in some of the biggest and most demanding environments. Also an open source tool, it is based in Ruby with a customized DSL. That is closer to JSON for working within it. Similar to Chef, it runs a master-client setup and a model-driven approach. In short, some of the pros and cons of Puppet are:

Last on our list is a CLI-based tool that can be set up as a master-client or a non-centralized model. Saltstack is based in Python and it offers a push method as well as SSH method of communication with clients. Options for grouping of clients and configuration templates allow for simple control of the environment. Some of the pros and cons of Saltstack are:

For SuperAdmins it is imperative that our team is educated on the culture of continuous integration and delivery which is built into the process to achieve the expected efficiency from DevOps implementation.